Derek writes in,

I am very new to drawing and wondered if there are any pens that you would recommend…

I don’t recommend any particular drawing tools, because I think tools are very personal and idiosyncratic–I mean, the tools that work for one artist might not work for another. One of my artist friends won’t draw with anything more than a .5mm mechanical pencil. I, on the other hand, don’t like to draw with anything less bold than a 1mm gel pen.

Regardless, here’s a list of what I carry around in my bag:

• Miquelrius 300 page flexible notebook
  I can never decide on gridded vs. blank. Blank makes for prettier drawings, but gridded is great for taking notes.
• Pentel Pocket Brush Pen
• Sharpie Fine Point Marker
• Pilot G2 Gel Pen (1.0mm BOLD)
• 8-pack of Crayola crayons

The tools change, based on the occasion: when I go out with my wife to a movie or a concert, I carry a Sharpie or a gel pen and a stack of index cards.

Feel free to share your own favorite notebooks/drawing tools for Derek in the comments!

Edward Tufte care package

I’ve thought recently about abandoning sketchbooks in favor of single sheets of paper, index cards, legal pads, and binders: sketchbooks are convenient for carrying around, but they’re really hard to scan, and they don’t afford remixing or reshuffling pages. I want to make little books that are more like collages, without destroying the pages by using adhesive on them. I just need a little portfolio with plastic pages…something like what Lynda Barry has in this picture. Or like this. I could also just do the three-ring binder with page protectors. Any suggestions?

I’m thinking about this because Michelle Malott wrote in and asked me what kind of paper I used for my mind maps. My usual reply would be, “Whatever’s around,” but recently I’ve been a big fan of Edward Tufte’s graph paper he sells on his website. It’s acid-free, really nice and smooth, and has a “ghost” grid on it, which makes it easy to lay things out. I’ve been using the regular 8 1/2 x 11 sheets, saving up the 11 x 17 sheets for something really awesome.

You can see the results from my last two maps:

• VISUAL NOTE-TAKING 101 : UPCOMING VIZTHINK WEBINAR
• TOM PERROTTA MASTER CLASS

Tufte sent me a big batch of the paper after seeing my Beautiful Evidence and Envisioning Information maps. Tufte’s a “hero thinker” of mine, so it was a thrill to get mail from him. Come to think of it, I’ve had good luck getting mail from my heroes. Love how classy this little card is:

If you don’t know his work, you should.

Feast your eyes on the best birthday present ever: a 6×8 Wacom Graphire drawing tablet. Meg got it to replace my dinky 4×5 that I’ve been using for ages. This baby sits nice and heavy-duty on my lap, it’s got programmable buttons…oh, am I excited to get back to work on the book!

• New Shalom Auslander and Etgar Keret columns.
• Silverblatt discussing Beckett on Bookworm: reading Beckett’s prose opens you up to the comedy in the plays.
• Dan Bejar (Destroyer) talks. Meghan refuses to look at pictures of him because she wants to keep her image of him singing in a Transylvanian castle.

I see no necessity to apologize for the imperfections of this or of any similar imagery. Analogies of this kind are only intended to assist us in our attempt to make the complications of mental functioning intelligible.—Sigmund Freud, talking about his dream diagrams

* * *

I think I might use this someday as the epigraph for one of my comics. I collaged it onto the front of my sketchbook, with a few changes:

Clive Thompson made the great point, “your tools help determine how you think. So long as Freud used realistic modes of drawing, he was hemmed in by the dictates of straightforward physiology. To ponder the abstracts of human behavior, he needed to turn to abstract comix.”

Read some more about Freud’s drawings.